Exclusive Interview with LeanXcale’s CEO and Co-Founder

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CEO & Co-Founder of one of the presenting companies, LeanXcale. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with LeanXcale’s promo codeLeanXcale20LD17.

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Jimenez-Peris: For 25 years, I have devoted my career to resolving the main bottleneck of operational databases — transactional processing — in my position as director of Distributed Systems Laboratory at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). Additionally, I am the CEO and Co-Founder of LeanXcale and the technical director of the international projects CoherentPaaS, LeanBigData and CloudDBAppliance.

During my scientific career, I have been a co-author of over 100 publications in international conferences and journals, co-author of a book on database replication, as well as the manager of large international research projects, such as Adapt, Stream, and CumuloNimbo. The projects included teams between 20 to 50 people and involved 6 to 11 companies and research organizations, receiving public grants amounting to over 6 million euros. In addition, I am a co-inventor of 2 patents and 1 additional patent application. The research of my laboratory resulted in technology transfers to big international companies such as Ericsson, Telefonica, and Bull.

In March 2015, I quit my scientific career to launch LeanXcale. The idea behind the business was to commercialize an ultra-scalable database and the technology at the core of LeanXcale attracted much attention in Silicon Valley. Ten top tech companies — Twitter, Salesforce, Cloudera, HortonWorks, Pivotal, Heroku, HP, and Microsoft — invited me to speak at their headquarters.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

LeanXcale has developed an Ultra-Scalable SQL Operational & Analytical database using unique scalability to solve the lack of real-time big data support for financial organizations.

Jimenez-Peris: My favorite features of the LeanXcale platform are

The scalability of the operational database to millions of transactions per second and 100s of nodes

The combination of operational and analytical capabilities in a single database system

The elasticity of the database, which enables the provisioning and decommissioning of new nodes as needed in a totally non-intrusive way.

The polyglot integration with other NoSQL data stores enabling queries across SQL and different NoSQL data stores.

The efficiency of the storage engine in multi-core and NUMA architectures, as well as its hardware acceleration by means of vectorial processing and the acceleration, thanks to its hybrid columnar storage.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Jimenez-Peris: Operational database for fintech, either on premise or in the cloud, with capabilities to perform analytical queries over operational data.